The Finals Set Out To Redefine The Shooter Genre With “Dynamism” At Its Core

The Finals Creative Director Gustav explained the free-to-play shooter’s core design philosophy in a new video about “dynamism.” This refers to a commitment to player agency, creativity, and interactivity. Instead of making just another shooter, Embark Studios said they set out to create a game where players can shape their own experiences. Dynamism is broken into three key pillars: environmental dynamism, play style dynamism, and game-mode dynamism.

Environmental dynamism makes the world fully interactive and destructible, allowing players to tear down walls, collapse buildings, and use the map itself as a weapon or tool. Play style dynamism gives players freedom to customize their characters across three body types (light, medium, heavy), with tailored loadouts of weapons, gadgets, and specializations. Game-mode dynamism ties it all together with objective-based modes like Cash Out, which encourage attackers and defenders to use environmental destruction, gadgets, and teamwork to secure or break objectives.

The team faced several challenges, though. They had to focus on systems that maximized player agency, prototype many ideas quickly, and ensure destruction felt consistent and predictable. They solved major technical hurdles by adopting server-side physics so movement on dynamic surfaces stayed reliable. Game modes were tuned for longer fights, with objectives and time windows that let tactics and counterplay unfold.

Gustav highlighted that everything — from breaching walls to building with goo — works together to create one-of-a-kind, emergent scenarios. Mastery of The Finals comes from adapting to chaos and creatively using the environment, making Dynamism an important feature of the experience, according to the developers.